Regulatory Compliance

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Published on Monday, 14 March 2011 12:21

Written by Travis Howle

Access to the internet is subject to many different kinds of regulation and control, from corporate acceptable use policies through to the laws designed to protect children online.

CIPA Compliance	Netsweeper’s solutions help you to ensure that your users are compliant with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). CIPA is a law passed by the US Congress in 2000 to ensure child safety when accessing the Internet over school and library computers. Learn more about CIPA here. For schools and libraries in the US to receive e-Rate funding, they typically must have a CIPA-compliant filtering solution like Netsweeper in place.
	Netsweeper was the first filtering company to be accredited by Becta (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency). This accreditation required the Netsweeper application to accurately categorize and the block access to a list of sites deemed inappropriate or those that posed as a threat to pupils while online. Most importantly, Netsweeper was required to ensure access to websites noted in a dynamic list from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) was prohibited.
	The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is the only authorized organization in the UK operating an Internet 'hotline' for the public and IT professionals to report their exposure to potentially illegal content online. The goal of the IWF is to minimize the availability of potentially illegal Internet content, specifically. In some nations, blocking sites on the IWF list is a legal requirement.